Playing the Hits

Maybe Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a little bit like film director Kevin Smith. When Smith ventured outside his wheelhouse of adolescent dick jokes and sub-competent camera work to make the maudlin "Jennifer Lopez is dead" fantasy "Jersey Girl", we was rewarded with equal parts jeering rage and total apathy. So he retreated back into his comfort zone to shit out "Clerks 2", an amateurish (in a bad way) sequel to his first amateurish (in a good way) hit. And after the recent presidential "election" in Iran, when Ahmadinejad extended a cardboard cutout of an olive branch to democracy by pretending to run against a candidate who was also hand-picked by the Supreme Leader, he was probably shocked to be rewarded with angry mobs and green-tinted Twitter avatars. This might explain his recent comments in the Iranian state press just before his trip to Afghanistan this month. He's gone back to basics. He's just Mahmoud being Mahmoud. And as such, he's reiterated his belief that the 9/11 attacks were a "big lie" perpetrated by the U.S. government to invade Afghanistan and to serve as a "pretext for fighting terrorism". Sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense. No one in the U.S. government has profited from the invasion of Afghanistan, and there really doesn't need to be a pretext for fighting terrorism when terrorism is already a crime. But what do you expect from someone whose eyes are so close together? To top it off, Ahmadinejad closed his remarks with his biggest hit of all: sticking it to the Jews by claiming the Zionist-founded capitalist system is coming to an end. I'll say this for the guy: he knows his audience. More details here.